Photography, it seems, is in the Cooper genes. Robert’s grandfather was a keen amateur back in the days of sepia tones and glass negatives. He passed on his love of photography to Robert’s father, who, in his turn, introduced Robert to the art of black and white printing. Currently, most of Robert’s work is in colour. It aims, he says, “to touch the heart and lift the spirit, by celebrating the wonder of the natural world and delighting in the small things whose beauty often goes unnoticed.”
Many of the pictures on this site were taken on Holy Island in Northumberland, a place that Robert feels brings out the best in his photography. It is also somewhere that inspires images that don’t always find their way onto Robert’s cards. As he explains, “I love making straightforward landscape photographs, the kind that people want to send to family and friends, especially if they show a moment when the light was really striking or unusual. But my eye is often caught by odd bits of debris, driftwood or rock. In this kind of picture the content (perhaps a shed, an oil drum or a patch of rust) is the starting point, but it is not the key thing. What I’m more interested in is form – how these things appear – especially when real things can be simultaneously viewed as abstract shapes and patterns.
